,
suspected by the police, and marked as undesirable guests by the
Cossacks, and winked at by the walking delegates and strikers, who
thought we were non-union men looking for their jobs.

The next day the religious ceremony of "blessing the Neva" took place,
where all the population gets out on the bank of the river, with
overshoes on, and fur coats, and looks down on the river, covered with
ice four feet thick, and the river is blessed. In our country the people
would damn a river that had ice four feet thick, but in Russia they
bless anything that will stand it. We got a good place on the bank of
the river, with about a million people who had sheepskin coats on,
and who steamed like a sheep ranch, and were enjoying the performance,
looking occasionally at the Winter palace, where the czar was peeking
out of a window, wondering from which direction a bomb would come to
blow him up, when a battery of artillery across the river started
to fire a salute, and then the devil was to pay. It seems that the
gentlemen who handled the guns, and who were supposed to fire blank
cartridges into the air, put in loaded cartridges, filled with grape
shot, and took aim at the Winter palace, and cut loose at Mr. Czar.

Well, you would have been paralyzed to see the change that came over
that crowd, blessing the river one minute and damning the czar and the
grand dukes the next. The shot went into the Winter palace and tore the
furniture and ripped up the ceiling of the room the czar was in, and in
a moment all was chaos, as though every Russian knew the czar was to be
assassinated at that particular moment, and all rushed toward the Winter
palace as though they expected pieces of the Little Father would be
thrown out the window for them to play football with. For a people who
are supposed to be lawful and law-abiding, and who love their rulers, it
seemed strange to see them all so tickled when they thought he was blown
higher than a kite by his own soldiers.

Dad and I started with the crowd for the Winter palace, and then we had
a taste of monarchial government. The crowd was rushing over us and dad
got mad and pulled off his coat and said he could whip any confounded
foreigner that rubbed against him with a sheepskin coat on, and he was
just on the point of smiting a fellow with whiskers that looked like
scrambled bristles off a black hog when a regiment of Cossacks came down
on the crowd, riding horses like a wild west show, and w